Science

The feminist establishment has gone completely around the bend. I’m not sure when it happened.; I doubt it is a recent development. In her prescient 1972 book The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation, Midge Decter examined the second-generation literature of feminism and found it rotten at the core, if not rotten to the core. I haven’t kept up with the literature. My impression, however, is that the »

Remember how Obama promised in his first inaugural address to “restore science to its rightful place”? Beyond this gratuitous dig at the outgoing Bush administration, it is curious to see that Obama’s idea of scientific authority is the egregious John Holdren, whom Obama chose as his science adviser. For Halloween our pal Rob Bradley of the Institute for Energy Research compiled a list of Holdren’s greatest hits over at the »

The NIH’s Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared on Meet the Press with Chuck Todd this morning (video below). The occasion of his appearance was the new case of Ebola that has been contracted by a Dallas “health worker” who treating the patient from Liberia who died last week. How could the health worker have gotten infected with Ebola? “What obviously happened, unfortunately, is that there was an inadvertent breach of protocol,” »

Last week J. Christian Adams posted an important and informative column on “‘CATALIST’: The Democrats’ database for fundamentally transforming America.” This was all news to me, I confess, and I am grateful to have it brought to my attention. Please check it out. Catalist, as I understand it, is the database that, among other things, helps Democrats microtarget voters. Adams points out that Mitt Romney won independents in the 2012 »

So if the scientific establishment is so robust and full of integrity and credibility, how does this happen: This scientific journal just had to retract 60 papers One of the biggest cases of scientific misconduct in history was uncovered this week. On July 8, scientific publisher SAGE announced that it was retracting a whopping 60 scientific papers connected to Taiwanese researcher Peter Chen, in what appears to be an elaborate work »

Outside of universities, the other notable place with a shocking lack of ideological and cultural diversity is major media newsrooms. While most newsrooms have the requisite numbers of women, minorities, and gays (nearly all of them liberal conformists), you will seldom find an evangelical Christian or an orthodox Jew. Hence you find New York Times columnist Charles Blow reflecting today that not only are lots of Americans Christians, but they »

Not long ago the journal Issues in Science and Technology (a consortium publication of the National Academy of Sciences, Arizona State, and three other institutions) challenged me to write a piece about “Conservatism and Climate Science,” and the long piece is just now available online. But it’s really not about climate science, but rather climate policy, and the heart of the article is a lengthy consideration of the problem of »

Conservatives are said to be “anti-science,” though one ought to pause once and a while and ponder where the opposition to vaccines and genetically modified organisms comes from. A belief in a literal six-day creation 6,000 years ago harms no one; urging parents not to vaccinate their children, as prominent liberals and celebrities have done, leads to unnecessary death and disease. One problem for the scientific community is that much »

An interesting item for a Friday evening: a team of Australian researchers has come to the startling conclusion that there are 20 times as many fish in the sea as previously believed: Scientists have vastly underestimated the number of fish in the sea – and say the majority of them have never been fished. Australian researchers found that mesopelagic fish, which live between 100 and 1000m below the surface, constitute »

One of the more amusing aspects of the current political scene is the claim of liberals to be “pro-science”–a claim that is often made in the context of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory, which is anything but scientific. Science is a method, not a body of dogma, and I am not aware of anyone in public life who is anti-science. Of course, before you can be pro- or anti-anything, »

. . . in its first moments. Hat tip to FB pal and Power Line reader Kate Pitrone for flagging this old video from 1981, showing the earliest experiments with online news gathering and transmission. I vividly recall seeing the earliest version of FAX technology back in 1981, when my mentor M. Stanton Evans would send his syndicated column to the Los Angeles Times by wrapping each page of the »

The Green Weenie of the Week about the weather and violent crime reminded of the all-time most risible excursion into social science fatuity back in 2002, when a couple of journal articles claimed to discern a correlation between high suicide rates and conservatives parties being in power. So from the archives from September 2oo2, here’s my short column “Killer Party.” File this under “Social Science: Is There Anything It Can’t do?” Conservatives »

It is not necessary to be a Trekkie (but really, why wouldn’t you be?) to appreciate the intergenerational rivalry of this Audi ad featuring the original Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) versus the “rebooted” younger Spock, Zachary Quinto. And kudos to Nimoy, for being game to spoof the most embarrassing moment of his entire career; and no, I don’t mean that Trek episode where he got the seven-year Vulcan itch. Rather, »

Ben Boychuk of City Journal California (and the fine InfiniteMonkeys blog) has been after me for a while to write for its pages now that I’ve been foolish enough to move back to the less-than-golden state, but I’ve been too busy to oblige. But when he pointed me to the latest nonsense from the climate capos about how California’s wine industry was imperiled, I had to swing into action. The result »

This letter to the editor of a newspaper in Washington State was written by Dr. David Deming in response to an attack on Don Easterbrook by a group of professors at Western Washington University. I thought it was too good not to share; in part, because it isn’t just about global warming alarmism, it is about science. Via Watts Up With That? Note that there are numerous links in the »

So what has become of the new Boeing Dreamliner? Since its grounding in January owing to its twitchy lithium-ion batteries, there’s been little news. This is an unusually long grounding for a plane, especially one as technologically advanced as the 787. I know a little about this kind of thing, which is why I’ve been following this story keenly for a long time. In the early weeks of the 747 »

Quantitative social science is best when it provides rigorous evidence of counter-intuitive propositions, that is, when it can debunk commonly held perceptions about phenomena. A good example is Charles Murray’s careful analysis of social survey data in Coming Apart, showing that in fact low-income whites are abandoning religion and marriage much more than high-income whites—the reverse of what is typically perceived. But much of the time, social science is proving »